Page 50 of A Series of Rooms
He’d used the wrong name.
Again.
Liam took a step closer, but as he did, the man took hold of Jonah’s arm and yanked him toward the car.
“Do we have a problem, kid?” the man said to Liam. They were close enough now that he kept his voice low. The streets were relatively empty this early on a Saturday morning, so there was no one around to see the flash of black metaltucked into his waistband as he drew back the hem of his jacket.
Liam froze. His eyes moved to Jonah, who was silently pleading with him from behind the man’s shoulder. There was already a patch of red blossoming on his upper arm from the way he had been handled. Liam wanted to scream.
“It’s my fault he was late,” he whispered. “Completely my fault.”
The man stared at him, unmoving. Behind him, Jonah shook his head, and Liam wasn’t sure if it was in disagreement with his assertion of fault or if he was begging Liam to stop making things worse.
“Leo, get in the car,” the man said without looking away from Liam. Jonah didn’t hesitate to comply, closing himself into the backseat without so much as a glance back at Liam. The man stepped into Liam’s space. “There a reason you’re following him?”
“I—” Liam began, but the man snapped his fingers in front of his face.
“Don’t look at him. Look at me. I asked you a question.”
Liam’s eyes snapped back to his. He couldn’t see Jonah through the tinted window of the backseat anyway. “I didn’t— I wasn’t...” It was hard to speak in the face of someone he both hated and feared in equal measure. “I forgot to give him this.” He held out the wad of cash, crushed and damp with sweat from where he was squeezing it tightly in his palm.
The man snatched the money from his hand, making him flinch, and then making him hate himself for flinching. He counted out the bills in front of Liam and tucked them into his jacket. When he reached for something else in his pocket, Liam froze, sure that he was going for the gun, but he pulled out his phone instead. A second later, he flashed a headless photo of Liam at him—the picture from his profile.
“This is you?” he asked.
Unsure if that was rhetorical, Liam nodded. Then he watched in horror as he tapped the red button at the bottom of the screen, effectively blocking Liam’s only line of access to Jonah.
“I don’t know what you think this is,” he said. “But it’s over. Don’t try to contact him again.”
Before Liam could begin to muster a response, an objection, a plea, the man turned away from him and rounded to the driver’s side door. He could do nothing but watch as the car pulled away, leaving Liam standing in the cold.
CHAPTER 22
Jonah
The absence of Liam’s sweatshirt was a cool burn over his skin as the car carried him toward the outskirts of the city. Jonah dug his fingers into his sides as he tried to focus on breathing.
The crash from the whirlwind of a morning was landing hard. The fear of whatever repercussions awaited him almost paled in comparison to the guilt of how he’d left things with Liam. The image of him standing there on the sidewalk with desperate, pleading eyes was seared into Jonah’s memory. Even after an hour of Jonah at his worst—impatient and snappy and scared out of his mind—Liam still looked at him like he was someone worth saving. And Jonah had left him there, alone.
It stung to realize that this was the natural consequence of his actions. Jonah had been playing with fire for too long, inching closer and closer to the warmth of the flame he had been kindling with Liam, and he had finally been burned.He only wished he could have spared Liam the trauma of the fallout.
They were minutes away from the house, the dilapidated landmarks of the neighborhood coming into view, when Marcus spoke up from the front seat.
“You want to tell me what that was about?”
Jonah winced. What could he say? Telling him anything about Liam was out of the question, but Marcus had seen too much to buy him playing dumb.
“You were late.” Marcus met his eyes in the rearview mirror, impatient for an answer.
“I overslept.” Jonah’s voice cracked. “It was an accident.”
“That wasn’t the direction of the hotel you were coming from.”
His ribs were going to bruise from how hard he was digging his fingertips in.
“He called you Jonah,” Marcus accused.
He squeezed his eyes shut. There was nothing he could say to that. Nothing he said would ever dig him out of the hole he had dug for himself.
